


Ghost Medicine

by indiachick



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bees, Gen, I don't know, Mark of Cain, dead bees?, utter weirdness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-11
Updated: 2014-05-11
Packaged: 2018-01-24 07:56:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1597388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indiachick/pseuds/indiachick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean and Cain talk ghosts, and bees, and Marks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ghost Medicine

_I pulled you out of a burning building_ , Cain says. _Ten thousand burning bees and one burning woman and I pulled_ YOU _out._

And Dean’s fucking grateful, he is. Give the Original Murderer a fucking medal for bravery in the face of hellfire arson. But he’s just going to lie here, because Cain is lying and the fire isn’t gone yet, and he can feel it pooling in his lungs. Beneath his skin. Singing his eyebrows. He’s not going to open his eyes yet, because the force required for that will possibly undo him.

 _I saved you so you can keep your word,_ Cain says. _Not that you can die, not with the Mark, but I still saved you._

The air is dense, weighted down with humidity. His skin crawls with alternating heat and cold. His throat is sandpaper and stone, and time passes but in paradoxical leaps and crawls, so he’ll either blink to find that days have passed, or fall into deep sleep and wake up seconds later. The air around him feels friable, thin. He’s burning.

Whenever he’s awake Sam’s reading him a book, about a man who can’t find Death, about a man who walked around the world and through the thin veils between dimensions looking for Death. And when he found Death’s cave with the candle of his life grown fatter and taller than all the rest, he broke and murdered till they put him in an electric chair. And in the end, the lightning from it that grew and mutated inside of him killed everyone else in the room and left him unhurt.

 _Irony,_ Sam laughs. _Or analogy: I don’t know which one. Both?_

Sam’s not really here, of course. Will never be. There’s just Dean and this house, wherever this is, this house that makes all its protesting old noises and has either the sea or the wind battling for its basements. Probably the sea. The sea from which life slithered out at the beginning and the sea which will take it all in the end. The sea, him, the house, and the ghosts of ten thousand burning bees. He knows all their names. It’s fucking weird that the woman would name _all_ her bees, not just the queens, but she was not the normal kind of hunter. Had a memory that couldn’t fit on a computer hard-disk. Had a library that would surpass the Men of Letters, with texts from Urmia and the hidden mosques of Byzantium. Had weapons from lost magical tribes in Socotra, and red silk pouches of small-pox from the bloody stone steps of Kali Ghat.

 _Dr. Ogilvy was an academician first and a hunter later,_ Cain says. He’s forcing water down Dean’s throat, strange water that tastes faintly of iron and salt, and Dean sputters. _I’m not surprised._

Dean knows everything about Dr. Ogilvy too. And Abaddon, and Magnus, and everyone else. Everything that the First Blade’s killed since it belonged to him. Their memories swirl inside of his head in dizzying spirals. They split and warp and fight for space like so many shards in a kaleidoscope. They make waxy golden hexagonal holes, spill over and into him.

Dean breathes in the air, the salt and damp and oil of it. His ghosts hide in the hollows of his ribcage, in the bellows of his lungs, and breathe in with him.

**\--**

In the zenith of his delirium, when it seems like he’s fire-red and being boiled alive like a lobster, Dean has strange hallucinations.

First he’s in Ogilvy’s home, odd room of stained-glass ceiling and a low table full of scrolls and sprockets, books and piston-parts. On the walls are glass shelves filled with collectors’ items, on the corner of the room is a metalwork dinosaur that can move on spidery strings like a puppet.

“Just a hobby,” Ogilvy tells him, close enough to touch, close enough to kiss, close enough to burn. A bee-sting has puffed up her cheek. Her gums ooze blood. “Playing with things. Taking them apart.”

 She explodes into flame like a Molotov cocktail, and laughs, tells him _you want to burn, don’t you, you want to burn,_ until Dean cuts her head off, both of them aflame, but the fire only fatal for her, her books, her bees. Never him.

The blade sings, and where Ogilvy’s head rolls to a rest, Cain is striking a steel pick against a solid iron floor. Wherever the pick strikes there’s a golden spark, like lightning, like Cain is Vulcan spinning sweat and blood into making jagged electricity. Dean stands far above him, on a perch that seems precarious, and asks him what he’s doing.

“Looking for my brother,” Cain tells him calmly. “To put him back together.”

And then Cain says: _If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable._

The dream shifts again. Dean sits on his bed and the sky rains ultramarine. The water pools around him and rises to his knees, and Sam’s at the window, looking at him unhappily.

“Where are you going?”

 _(I’ve walked the earth forever,_ Cain says.)

Sam snorts, cocking one eyebrow suspiciously. “You don’t know?”

Dean shakes his head. Sam looks at him, and there are flecks of gold and mica in his eyes, like genuine fear. He draws closer against the window, pulls it up with a sound loud enough to rouse the dead.

“Wherever you sent me, I guess. You do that—you know. Send me off on wild chases.”

 _(It’s your turn now,_ Cain says.)

 Dean gives a derisive scoff. “It’s only for your own good if I did—”

_(And the world could end and the universe could peel back and time could shift so the Big Bang touches the Apocalypse with all of the light years trapped in between, and this is my warning that you didn’t heed.)_

Sam rolls his eyes, throws a long loop of tied-together bed-sheets out of the window. “Yeah, well,” he says, one foot on the sill. “Now I can’t find you. Now you made sure I can never find you.”

_(Ten million years from now there will be none of these cities, none of this enterprise, none of this metal or glass or concrete. They are of a single moment, a single slip in time, and it is thus for all but you and me.)_

And on the heel of Sam’s disappearance, the dream comes apart, scattering with a buzz and flashes of gold. Dean lies there sweating and gasping, and wishes desperately that he could come apart too.

\--

“She was a friend,” Cain says, and scuffs some more dirt onto the patch of raw, newly-filled earth.

Dean looks at the variegated man—the graying hair and the dark eyebrows, the mixed mountain-man beard—and adds: _we raised bees together._ The thought takes on a bitter resonance and Dean wishes his brain would shut up.

He doesn’t know how long he slept and woke before his consciousness decided to stick to one state. Bit long, he guesses. It’s not summer anymore. This is the first he’s been out of the house.

Cain had carved the headstone himself—dark shale obelisk to mark the grave of the dead woman. Out here beneath the ring of cliffs the sand is the cold ice color of white quartz, and the stone sticks out like a sore thumb.

“She was a demon,” Dean says, closing his eyes against the cold, against Cain’s voice like thunder. His eyelids offer poor comfort against the bright sun, but he keeps them shut anyway. Pulls his jacket closer around his chin, and he knows it looks as if he’s trying to disappear. He doesn’t care. “When I found her, she was on _fire,_ she was a –”

“I don’t know about your politics, and frankly, I don’t care. She’s just bones now,” Cain says, and leans to carve a sigil. “Something got to her before you or I did.”

“I was there—”

“For information, yes. On what to do about the Mark, now that you no longer want it. Ogilvy could have given you that information, had she not been compromised. I’m guessing Abaddon. She had foresight, however crass she was—she knew you’d go to Ogilvy for information some day.”

Dean looks down at the unmarked headstone.

“I thought I should wait for you,” Cain says. “Before I bury your undeserving dead.”

Dean breathes in, and the breath stutters in his chest, goes in like salt-water. There’s still the faint taste of ash at the back of his throat, scorched rings in his windpipe where he swallowed flames. _Ten thousand burning bees and one burning woman and I pulled YOU out._ But not just him, because all of her bees are still working in his veins, their stingers in him filling him with venom— sweet and sharp and sour. His flesh runs with their honey and poison. And also Ogilvy, her impressions, her perceptions, sharply hued in neon and tangerines. The last screaming minutes of her death-throe panic rises up and lodges in his throat, beating sharp hummingbird wings.

  _Is this the burden?_ Dean wants to ask. _Is this the burden of carrying the Mark— that you remember everything that died from it?_

“Do you want to know where your brother is?”

That gives Dean pause. “You know?”

“No. I just want to know if you _want_ to know.”

Dean shrugs. _Not if he’s okay. Not if he can’t find me._

Cain fixes him with an unwavering gaze. Dean had this impression of Cain in his mind like a wall, of someone tall and fixed and unswaying like the stars, but without the Mark, he’s just a man, really. One man, set adrift and then on the roof of the cosmos, forever waiting.

“Getting rid of the Mark won’t get rid of the ghosts, Dean.”

Cain hauls the pickaxe and shovel over his shoulder and looks back at the interment once before he starts walking back, towards the gravel trail that leads to his precarious, funny glass house. It’s not the one with the hives, not the one where Crowley took him— _when?_ Agesago _._

It’s got French windows and blocks of frosty glass through which sunlight swims like it’s making its way from two fathoms underwater. Whatever Cain’s been doing all these years, he’s been doing well enough to pay mortgage. Or, you know, the house is just _magic_.

Like Magnus, like his invisible house. The Magnus in Dean’s head is a virulent crimson thread that loops and loops and recites Tennyson. He’s louder than the others, clearer:

_Below the thunders of the upper deep, far, far beneath in the abysmal sea, his ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep the Kraken sleepeth._

Looking at this sea? Kraken warnings seem well-placed.

Already the sky is turning, monochrome grey buried beneath the red-gold and lavender scales of impending sunset. The wind gets more insistent, screeching its throaty poetry of storm and thunder, teasing Dean’s hair, yanking at his clothes. Before long the sea will swallow the sun, will be made braver by the act.

 _Right-o_ , Dean tells the Magnus-ghost. He grasps the stalk of the single wildflower that grows amidst all the gorse and spike grass, pulls it out smoothly and drops it on Karen Ogilvy’s grave. Her voice, only ever truly heard over a phone conversation hushed with static, comes back to him in a whisper: _Listen, Winchester, I’ll tell you how to get rid of it, but you’ll have to come yourself._

And Dean had gone. To get rid of the ghosts, he’d gone.

And now he has her in his head, and all her bees, and all their names tripping over each other. Now he dreams of their black-gold corona and their venom, and in his dreams his vision flashes black-white-black.  Their rage leaves the after-taste of lavender.

Dean looks down at the Mark, rubs his palm over it and feels the raised skin, undeterred by everything he’s tried. Undeterred even by flame.

 _Roaring he shall rise_ , the Magnus-ghost says, _and on the surface die._

 _You will never die,_ Ogilvy says, _and the_ _world could end and the universe could peel back and—_

“Heard it already,” Dean mutters. He tightens his palm over the Mark, holds till his fingers stop trembling. “Damn poetry.”

Dean turns his back to the sea, to the storm brewing up there in the heavens and the dying things in the tidal pools trapped between the rocks. He doesn’t think of Sam, doesn’t think of time, and doesn’t think of the years that could roll on and all the warning labels he ignored. He’s not in a vicious cycle yet. He’d wanted the Mark, wanted the _clarity_ it brought, wanted the way it turned the world black and white.

It’s the grey he’s no good at. It’s the grey he’s _still_ not good yet.

_I saved you so you can keep your word. Getting rid of the Mark won’t get rid of the ghosts._

Dean pushes his hands in his pockets and walks back towards the house.

**Author's Note:**

> For this prompt: beekeeper!Dean: After the hunting world's only apiculturalist and her bees fall victim to hellfire arson, Dean enlists Cain's help one more time. This this time, he doesn't have a choice but to pay attention to the warning label.


End file.
